This paper investigates the fundamental limits for detecting a high-dimensional sparse matrix contaminated by white Gaussian noise from both the statistical and computational perspectives. We consider $p\times p$ matrices whose rows and columns are individually $k$-sparse. We provide a tight characterization of the statistical and computational limits for sparse matrix detection, which precisely describe when achieving optimal detection is easy, hard or impossible,…
Kyongwon Kim · Bing Li · Zhou Yu · Lexin Li·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
降维后的统计推断AI 解读
The methodologies of sufficient dimension reduction have undergone extensive developments in the past three decades. However, there has been a lack of systematic and rigorous development of post dimension reduction inference, which has seriously hindered its applications. The current common practice is to treat the estimated sufficient predictors as the true predictors and use them as the starting point of the downstream statistical inference. However, this naive inference…
It is a common saying that testing for conditional independence, that is, testing whether whether two random vectors $X$ and $Y$ are independent, given $Z$, is a hard statistical problem if $Z$ is a continuous random variable (or vector). In this paper, we prove that conditional independence is indeed a particularly difficult hypothesis to test for. Valid statistical tests are required to have a size that is smaller than a pre-defined significance level, and different tests…
Emmanuel Abbe · Jianqing Fan · Kaizheng Wang · Yiqiao Zhong·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
期望低秩随机矩阵的特征向量逐元素分析AI 解读
Recovering low-rank structures via eigenvector perturbation analysis is a common problem in statistical machine learning, such as in factor analysis, community detection, ranking, matrix completion, among others. While a large variety of bounds are available for average errors between empirical and population statistics of eigenvectors, few results are tight for entrywise analyses, which are critical for a number of problems such as community detection. This paper…
Given data from a Poisson point process with intensity $(x,y)\mapston\mathbf{1}(f(x)\leq y)$, frequentist properties for the Bayesian reconstruction of the support boundary function $f$ are derived. We mainly study compound Poisson process priors with fixed intensity proving that the posterior contracts with nearly optimal rate for monotone support boundaries and adapts to Hölder smooth boundaries. We then derive a limiting shape result for a compound Poisson process prior…
Aymeric Dieuleveut · Alain Durmus · Francis Bach·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
连接恒定步长随机梯度下降与马尔可夫链AI 解读
We consider the minimization of a strongly convex objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic functions, we provide an explicit asymptotic expansion of the moments of the averaged SGD iterates that outlines the dependence on initial conditions, the effect of noise and the step size, as well as the lack of convergence in the…
We propose a two-sample test for high-dimensional means that requires neither distributional nor correlational assumptions, besides some weak conditions on the moments and tail properties of the elements in the random vectors. This two-sample test based on a nontrivial extension of the one-sample central limit theorem (Ann. Probab. 45 (2017) 2309–2352) provides a practically useful procedure with rigorous theoretical guarantees on its size and power assessment. In…
Francesco Giordano · Soumendra Nath Lahiri · Maria Lucia Parrella·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
GRID:高维非参数回归的变量选择与结构发现方法AI 解读
We consider nonparametric regression in high dimensions where only a relatively small subset of a large number of variables are relevant and may have nonlinear effects on the response. We develop methods for variable selection, structure discovery and estimation of the true low-dimensional regression function, allowing any degree of interactions among the relevant variables that need not be specified a-priori. The proposed method, called the GRID, combines empirical…
We consider the five classes of multivariate statistical problems identified by James (Ann. Math. Stat. 35 (1964) 475–501), which together cover much of classical multivariate analysis, plus a simpler limiting case, symmetric matrix denoising. Each of James’ problems involves the eigenvalues of $E^{-1}H$ where $H$ and $E$ are proportional to high-dimensional Wishart matrices. Under the null hypothesis, both Wisharts are central with identity covariance. Under the…
Lei Han · Kean Ming Tan · Ting Yang · Tong Zhang·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
A major challenge for building statistical models in the big data era is that the available data volume far exceeds the computational capability. A common approach for solving this problem is to employ a subsampled dataset that can be handled by available computational resources. We propose a general subsampling scheme for large-scale multiclass logistic regression and examine the variance of the resulting estimator. We show that asymptotically, the proposed method always…
Qingyuan Zhao · Jingshu Wang · Gibran Hemani · Jack Bowden · Dylan S. Small·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
利用稳健调整剖面得分进行双样本汇总数据孟德尔随机化推断AI 解读
Mendelian randomization (MR) is a method of exploiting genetic variation to unbiasedly estimate a causal effect in presence of unmeasured confounding. MR is being widely used in epidemiology and other related areas of population science. In this paper, we study statistical inference in the increasingly popular two-sample summary-data MR design. We show a linear model for the observed associations approximately holds in a wide variety of settings when all the genetic variants…
Matias D. Cattaneo · Max H. Farrell · Yingjie Feng·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
基于分区的级数估计量的大样本性质AI 解读
We present large sample results for partitioning-based least squares nonparametric regression, a popular method for approximating conditional expectation functions in statistics, econometrics and machine learning. First, we obtain a general characterization of their leading asymptotic bias. Second, we establish integrated mean squared error approximations for the point estimator and propose feasible tuning parameter selection. Third, we develop pointwise inference methods…
Let $X$ be a centered random vector taking values in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and let $\Sigma=\mathbb{E}(X\otimes X)$ be its covariance matrix. We show that if $X$ satisfies an $L_{4}-L_{2}$ norm equivalence (sometimes referred to as the bounded kurtosis assumption), there is a covariance estimator $\hat{\Sigma}$ that exhibits almost the same performance one would expect had $X$ been a Gaussian vector. The procedure also improves the current state-of-the-art regarding high…
Detection of an image boundary when the pixel intensities are measured with noise is an important problem in image segmentation. From a statistical point of view, a challenge is that likelihood-based methods require modeling the pixel intensities inside and outside the image boundary, even though these distributions are typically not of interest. Since misspecification of the pixel intensity distributions can negatively affect inference on the image boundary, it would be…
While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive data sets is often challenging, when possible at all. The classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the model dimension and the sample size are large. Variational Bayesian methods aim at approximating the posterior by a distribution in a tractable family $\mathcal{F}$. Thus, MCMC are replaced by an optimization algorithm which is orders of magnitude…
Rina Foygel Barber · Emmanuel J. Candès · Richard J. Samworth·刊期 2020-06-01 · 卷 48(3)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
Knockoff 方法的稳健推断AI 解读
We consider the variable selection problem, which seeks to identify important variables influencing a response $Y$ out of many candidate features $X_{1},\ldots ,X_{p}$. We wish to do so while offering finite-sample guarantees about the fraction of false positives—selected variables $X_{j}$ that in fact have no effect on $Y$ after the other features are known. When the number of features $p$ is large (perhaps even larger than the sample size $n$), and we have no prior…
The problem of determining a periodic Lipschitz vector field $b=(b_{1},\ldots ,b_{d})$ from an observed trajectory of the solution $(X_{t}:0\le t\le T)$ of the multi-dimensional stochastic differential equation \begin{equation*}dX_{t}=b(X_{t})\,dt+dW_{t},\quad t\geq 0,\end{equation*} where $W_{t}$ is a standard $d$-dimensional Brownian motion, is considered. Convergence rates of a penalised least squares estimator, which equals the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate…
In the absence of explicit regularization, Kernel “Ridgeless” Regression with nonlinear kernels has the potential to fit the training data perfectly. It has been observed empirically, however, that such interpolated solutions can still generalize well on test data. We isolate a phenomenon of implicit regularization for minimum-norm interpolated solutions which is due to a combination of high dimensionality of the input data, curvature of the kernel function and favorable…
We study the asymptotic distributions of the spiked eigenvalues and the largest nonspiked eigenvalue of the sample covariance matrix under a general covariance model with divergent spiked eigenvalues, while the other eigenvalues are bounded but otherwise arbitrary. The limiting normal distribution for the spiked sample eigenvalues is established. It has distinct features that the asymptotic mean relies on not only the population spikes but also the nonspikes and that the…
This paper provides a rigorous treatment on design-based estimating equation inference using complex survey data in the presence of nuisance functionals. The proposed design-based framework covers parameters from inequality measures and measures on performance evaluation in economic, business and financial studies but the scope of the paper is more broad. Unlike nuisance parameters in other settings where profile analysis is commonly used, the nuisance functionals are…
We introduce a dynamic network model with probabilistic link functions that depend on stochastically time-varying parameters. We adopt a blockmodel framework and allow the high-dimensional vector of link probabilities to be a function of a low-dimensional set of dynamic factors. The resulting dynamic factor network model has a basic and transparent structure. However, parameter estimation, signal extraction of stochastic loadings and dynamic factors, and the econometric…
Deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison, especially after Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to estimate candidate models. This paper first studies the problem of using DIC to compare latent variable models when DIC is calculated from the conditional likelihood. In particular, it is shown that the conditional likelihood approach undermines theoretical underpinnings of DIC. A new version of DIC, namely DICL, is proposed to…
Giovanni Barone-Adesi · Nicola Fusari · Antonietta Mira · Carlo Sala·刊期 2020-06 · 卷 216(2)·Journal of Econometrics已编入正刊
期权市场交易活动与定价核估计:贝叶斯方法AI 解读
We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the amount of trading activity in deep-out-of-the-money options. We use the option-adjusted physical measure to construct an option-adjusted pricing kernel. An empirical investigation on…
We study the problem of counterfactual prediction in discrete decision games with complete information, pure strategies, and Nash equilibria: the presence of multiple equilibria poses unique challenges. We introduce multiple types of counterfactuals to establish sharp identified bounds for their prediction probabilities. We propose and compare various point prediction methods, namely midpoint prediction, an approach using a Dirichlet-based prior, a maximum entropy method,…
This paper investigates the fundamental limits for detecting a high-dimensional sparse matrix contaminated by white Gaussian noise from both the statistical and computational perspectives. We consider p×p matrices whose rows and columns are individually k-sparse. We provide a tight characterization of the statistical and computational limits for sparse matrix detection, which precisely describe when achieving optimal detection is easy, hard or impossible,…
It is a common saying that testing for conditional independence, that is, testing whether whether two random vectors X and Y are independent, given Z, is a hard statistical problem if Z is a continuous random variable (or vector). In this paper, we prove that conditional independence is indeed a particularly difficult hypothesis to test for. Valid statistical tests are required to have a size that is smaller than a pre-defined significance level, and different tests…
Given data from a Poisson point process with intensity $(x,y)\mapston\mathbf{1}(f(x)\leq y)$, frequentist properties for the Bayesian reconstruction of the support boundary function f are derived. We mainly study compound Poisson process priors with fixed intensity proving that the posterior contracts with nearly optimal rate for monotone support boundaries and adapts to Hölder smooth boundaries. We then derive a limiting shape result for a compound Poisson process prior…
We consider the five classes of multivariate statistical problems identified by James (Ann. Math. Stat. 35 (1964) 475–501), which together cover much of classical multivariate analysis, plus a simpler limiting case, symmetric matrix denoising. Each of James’ problems involves the eigenvalues of E−1H where H and E are proportional to high-dimensional Wishart matrices. Under the null hypothesis, both Wisharts are central with identity covariance. Under the…
Robust covariance estimation under L4−L2 norm equivalence
Let X be a centered random vector taking values in Rd and let Σ=E(X⊗X) be its covariance matrix. We show that if X satisfies an L4−L2 norm equivalence (sometimes referred to as the bounded kurtosis assumption), there is a covariance estimator Σ^ that exhibits almost the same performance one would expect had X been a Gaussian vector. The procedure also improves the current state-of-the-art regarding high…
While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive data sets is often challenging, when possible at all. The classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the model dimension and the sample size are large. Variational Bayesian methods aim at approximating the posterior by a distribution in a tractable family F. Thus, MCMC are replaced by an optimization algorithm which is orders of magnitude…
We consider the variable selection problem, which seeks to identify important variables influencing a response Y out of many candidate features X1,…,Xp. We wish to do so while offering finite-sample guarantees about the fraction of false positives—selected variables Xj that in fact have no effect on Y after the other features are known. When the number of features p is large (perhaps even larger than the sample size n), and we have no prior…
The problem of determining a periodic Lipschitz vector field b=(b1,…,bd) from an observed trajectory of the solution (Xt:0≤t≤T) of the multi-dimensional stochastic differential equation dXt=b(Xt)dt+dWt,t≥0, where Wt is a standard d-dimensional Brownian motion, is considered. Convergence rates of a penalised least squares estimator, which equals the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate…